An affair to remember

Take a sultry and sensuous journey through the life and romances of a middle-aged woman.

By Review by Emma Young

16 June 2012 — 3:00am

Not many novels require you to know what is meant by ''the gentle art of frotting''. For those about to defer to Wikipedia, frottage is the act of rubbing up against someone, or something, for sexual gratification. In Susan Johnson's My Hundred Lovers, it appears in a vignette of an animist who's fallen in love with the Berlin Wall, a relationship severely tested in the winter of 1989.

Johnson's eighth novel is the chronicling of one woman's sensory memory. Deborah, the narrator, is a middle-aged woman reflecting on the touch and feel of years past. Her thoughts take the form of an unconventional memoir: 100 brief chapters catalogue her experiences of love. What she composes is a history of her body, her tiring flesh a map of what she has ''lived, loved and suffered''.

Illustration: Simon Bosch

From the beginning, she is prone to the sensual: her Australian childhood is distinguished by memories of her mother's red fingernails along her back and her brother's searching fingers. When she becomes a woman, she seeks out a series of lovers: there's the dissolute lover, the beautiful lover, the shadow lover, the blind lover and, among others, the bottom lover. Her interest is not restricted to one gender. She kisses girls and eventually goes to bed with one: ''Celestine was the surprise of finding out what one woman did to another in bed.''

Sex isn't the only subject to make it onto her list of loves. The lyrical eroticism of Johnson's writing is applied to a range of objects and moments. The feeling of grass beneath her feet, giggling, a house, the poetry of the bath and her car are all granted their own chapters.

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My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson. Allen & Unwin, $27.99.

Words are frequently drawn into her appreciation for sensation. When she's living in Paris, she falls for the language, ''to feel my lips push out into a sensual pout because French words sit forward in the mouth, well past the fat roll of tongue at the back of the throat''.

Her family is interwoven in these memories and their characters built in pieces. Her mother is a spiteful drunk, her father is a neglectful philanderer, her sister is beautiful and her Nana Elsie is a rare beacon of prudence.

The relationship that is perhaps the most significant, though not dwelt upon more than any other, is the one she has with her son. An artefact from the one year, two months and 12 days of happiness with her husband, the needs of the baby make her body new again.

The form developed by Johnson has as much impact as the substance it's shaped around. The short chapters, devoted to the evocation of sensual experiences and not the steady beat of chronology, construct a story that is meaningful, but also playful.

Johnson's manipulation of Deborah's voice is equally persuasive. It takes a different approach according to the scene, moving from ''I'' to ''the young woman'' and sometimes ''the Suspicious Wanderer''.

It's an interesting deviation from the standards of a first-person account, managing the expectations of the reader by doling out intimacy and distance.

Her place in history is explored, like everything else, in moments. Deborah experiences ''the dying days of the sexual revolution'', before AIDS made sexual levity less likely, and she acts with a determination to make the most of the defiance condoned by the women's liberation movement.

However, the chance to be ''a new feminist, a new type of woman'' is not completely free of disappointment: ''She is supposed to have the wit to say no to the plump man who wants to f--k her.''

Through this restrained commentary, the story of a woman's self-examination is given resonance beyond the individual; her story is something both unique and shared.

In the literary tradition, men have largely shaped notions of desire and sexuality. Think Casanova, Henry Miller and Michel Houellebecq. Female writers such as Angela Carter, Erica Jong and Jeanette Winterson have negotiated the terrain, but with less frequency.

My Hundred Lovers is an original imagining of one woman's waning flesh and the vibrant imprint of a life it still holds.